ART APPRECIATION:

IMAGINATION AND REALITY

BY JEANETTE WINTERSON
SIR PAOLO TENCHAVEZ
BACKGROUND OF THE WRITER,
JEANETTE WINTERSON
• (British, born 27 August 1959)
• Famous for her novel, “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit”
about gender and religion. (rebelling against convention)
• Winterson's subsequent novels explore the boundaries of
physicality and the imagination, gender polarities, and
sexual identities, and have won several literary awards.
• Professor of Creative Writing at Oxford University
 WINTERSON’S POINT OF VIEW: NOTIONAL REALITY

• She asks 2 questions at the beginning:

What is Reality of Art?
What is Reality of Imagination?

• Subjective experience is plaguing the art scene (no one way

to look at art)
• Court Photographer=Artist (capture only moment)
• Advocates the return of the visionary artist.
 WINTERSON’S POINT OF VIEW: NOTIONAL REALITY

• Notional Reality:
Real from (‘res’: latin for
‘thing’), used by the Spanish as
like the ‘sixpence’
 WINTERSON’S POINT OF VIEW: NOTIONAL REALITY

• Art if it was a silver coin cannot be spent (exchanged or

exhausted) –because imagination itself is limitless.

• life encouraged by governments.

- Passive, routine
- Disregard for individuality
- Earn money to buy things
 WINTERSON’S POINT OF VIEW: NOTIONAL REALITY

• Education is not designed to turn

out individualists, but rather to
make you into the workforce.
• So too is entertainment passive.
(consumer)
• Children are beaten down by
• If imagination is to be
culture until they accept this
renewed we need the
reality.
mintage of Art.
 WINTERSON’S POINT OF VIEW: MONEY CULTURE

• A variation of symbolic reality: is the

notional (unquestioning/faith based)
reality.
• Senses are the sum of reality.
• (philosophy and physics don’t accept
this)
• Religion in the past made us doubt this
reality of senses
 WINTERSON’S POINT OF VIEW: MONEY CULTURE

Victorian (1820 and 1914) legacy:

-materialism
-whatever is not money or not making
money is useless
-”Goods are worth more than time and
things are more important than ideas.
It favors the survival of the dullards.”
 WINTERSON’S POINT OF VIEW: MONEY CULTURE

• “To Accept God was to Accept

Otherness”
• An Artist recognizes that there is more
to life than the mundane.
• Patronage of Artists in the past was
also license for them to be visionary.
 WINTERSON’S POINT OF VIEW: ART IS VISIONARY

• “Art sees beyond the view from the window and

it’s frame.”
• Art fares better alongside Religion than Ideology.
• Reality for the artist is multiple and complex.
• People in the present attack art for being Other, and
art bringa realities beyond the commonplace.
• We know we need this ‘otherness’ but we try to fill
that void by exoticizing the foreign

• ‘
 WINTERSON’S POINT OF VIEW: ART IS VISIONARY

• The time used by art is the anathema of money

culture. Because time’s value is often measured
by money.
• Art is reciprocity (surrender to art or resist it)
• Art is dangerous because it draws you away
from money culture
• The currency of art is the currency of
imagination.
 WINTERSON’S POINT OF VIEW: ART IS VISIONARY

• In Middle English: ‘Real’- was a variation of

‘royal’ (distinguished) yet still a man (unlike
priests)
- The king embodies imagination manifest in this
plane of reality
- Reality and imagination are inseparable (within
we are royal as well with the manifestation of
the soul) fusing together temporal and perpetual
realities.
 WINTERSON’S POINT OF VIEW: ART IS VISIONARY

• A realist is fooling himself because he is

trapped in a world of symbolism unable to
see beyond his own story.
• We ascribe value in how it affects
ourselves (subjective)
• The more familiar, the less it is seen.
We buy symbols to satiate our desire that those same symbols be recognized
by others and increase our value.
They are illusions.
 WINTERSON’S POINT OF VIEW: ART IS VISIONARY

• According to science: If an Image

consists of points through which
light actually passes, it is real.
• “The artist through the disciplines
of her work, is one of the few
people who does see things as they
really are, stripped of associative
value.”
 WINTERSON’S POINT OF VIEW: ART IS VISIONARY

Artists :
• Discernment: to know how to test the true and the false and to
reveal objects, emotions, ideas in their own coherence.
• Invention: the shaping spirit that re-forms fragments into new
wholes, so that even what has been familiar can be seen fresh.
• The artist is translator to pass on the knowledge he gleams.
 WINTERSON’S POINT OF VIEW: ART IS VISIONARY

• The artist is moved through different realities, looking for

‘real presence’ (other realities manifesting in our own)
• Artist are in a reality beyond now, beyond experience
• Artists bring back visions because it is their nature

The Reality of art is the reality of the imagination

SAKTO BA KAMO?

Based on your reading of the text:

Uhaw ka na and you only have a 10 peso coin in
your pocket would you rather spend it para
makabili nang bote nang Coke Sakto or bote
nang imahinasyon? Defend your answer utilizing
the characteristics of both money culture and the
reality of imagination

“I would have liked to have a bottle of _______ because

______However, I’m thirsty that’s why I chose the bottle of
______.”
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

• By promoting her idea of Art,

is Winterson advocating some sort of Escapism?
Elaborate on your answer.
• Do you agree with Winterson, that we live in a
'Notional Reality'? Why do you think so?